Beetle infestation boosting B.C.’s costly 400-plus wildfires

By Bill Mann

“I was just up in Northern B.C.,” read one comment to the Canadian Broadcast Corp. about the 400-plus wildfires now raging in the western province, “and the amount of dead wood from the pine beetle was extraordinary.”

Almost 200 new fires were reported during the long B.C. Day weekend just passed. And these are not your normal dry/hot weather summer fires, although that’s part of it. Firefighters are hoping for some downpours, although none are forecast.

The fires have already burned through B.C.’s entire annual $52 million firefighting budget, and is costing about $6 million a day.

Last year, B.C. budgeted $60 million to fight forest fires but ended up spending $400 million as more than 2,000 wildfires swept through the province.

Many of the fires, as the commenter noted, are the result of thousands of lush green acres that have been reduced to brown, dry tinder by the infestation that started several years ago. A drive through B.C.’s vast forests the past couple of years shows you one sobering, dry brown mountainside after another. The beetle is now killing trees in Montana and to the south.

Two pilots were killed in B.C. last weekend when their air tanker crashed near Lytton, B.C.

Southern fallout

There has been so much smoke from the Canadian fires that they have caused smoky skies in Seattle and Washington state. I witnessed an unusual, spectacular bright-orange sunset caused by B.C. smoke two nights ago in the western Washington town of Sequim (in the shadow of Olympic National Park).

“We don’t anticipate any significant decrease in fire activity in the coming days,” fire information officer Gwen Eamer told the CBC. “We expect to continue to add in the range of 50 fires every day.”

There is no concrete estimate yet of the amount of harvestable timber destroyed by these large fires, but it will be considerable.

The finger-pointing has already begun on B.C. talk shows and on blog comments.

Some have charged that pine-beetle-destroyed timber should have been quickly bulldozed years ago.

All the lightning storms passing through B.C. this week haven’t helped things, either.